


Pillow Conferences

by capncosmo



Category: Kamen Rider Kabuto
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-06-14
Updated: 2008-06-14
Packaged: 2017-10-18 02:22:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/183924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capncosmo/pseuds/capncosmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“<i>What?</i>  Tendou, it is too late at night for this.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pillow Conferences

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lazulisong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazulisong/gifts).



> For lazulisong, who requested an epic Heian AU with author's notes longer than the fic, except I wimped out on the epic part in the middle, so now it's Tendou/Kagami with Tendou being confusing in a Heian AU with epic author's notes. Okay, that was a mouthful. There were many pains gone into this fic, but this is just how it will have to be, because Kagami will just not wear the juni-hitoe no matter how hard I try. (-_-;) Special thanks to twentysomething who helped me work through a lot of the issues in this. Or, as she says I should say, I love my bestest friend who is a champion of things that are awesome in the Olympics of Cool.
> 
> Please note: Much of my history is faaaaaaaake, in so much as I'm not really an expert on the Heian period. All of it should be relevant in a general "long time ago in Japan" sense, though.
> 
> Okay, so. I had this great, epic plan. It was going to be great, because Hiyori was going to be a princess but Mishima wanted to kill her, because she was the only surviving heir to the fief and with her gone he could make a grab for power, so Tendou’s trying to stop him without revealing his own identity as the long lost prince (and now I say this, it sounds v. Gundam Wing, but) while still keeping the Tendou household afloat. Into the middle of all this comes Kagami, the new personal secretary, who tries to help Tendou out but mostly ends up having to avoid diplomatic incidents. And avoiding Shen Dai Jian (Musashi). And it was going to be great with Tendou greeting everyone with tanka and Kamakura era lolz (despite that it came after the Heian period; don’t care.) and Misaki and Tadokoro alternatively scaring Kagami half to death, but (like everything long I try to write) it’s pretty dead right now. Now, I am telling you all this because I figured if I couldn’t write the real thing, I could at least try to write Tendou and Kagami being ridiculous. This is kind of loosely based on some of the verses of the renga I translated last semester.
> 
> DATING IN JAPAN, OLD SCHOOL STYLE:  
> At night women would get dressed up in their 1,000 layer kimono, and then they would wait. And wait. And wait. Eventually, if some guy dug her, he’d bust into her garden and visit her, at which point they’d talk. I am not going to speculate on how much talking actually went on. By dawn, he had to be out of there, and he’d usually promise to come back tomorrow. Except he wouldn’t. Apparently an inability to keep promises is “just how men are.” Neither he nor she (interestingly enough) were limited to one lover at once. Which could get awkward if you happen to run into the Other Guy while breaking and entering. I am not exactly sure how a serious relationship would evolve into a marriage, but I know it would involve a go between and formal engagement ceremony and a lot of doing what your parents wanted you to do.
> 
> ARCHETECTURE:  
> Sho(u)ji = sliding door  
> Engawa = outdoor hallway/porch  
> Here, have some [pictures](http://images.google.com/images?q=traditional%20Japanese%20house&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi). See how there’s like that ledge around the house? Those are the hallways.  
> Pillow = wooden block
> 
> I figure (I don’t know much about it, but) that Kagami, as a secretary, would live separate from the main house in some kind of servant complex, but that he’d have his own room and stuff due to his status as someone with Learning and stuff, and also because he’d probably need somewhere quiet to work that didn’t have people around.
> 
> Japanese houses have walls/a gate around the outside (even my host family’s tiny apartment had one), and the area in between the house and the wall would be filled with happy garden things.
> 
> ABOUT TANKA:  
> Tanka are poems in a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern, related to (but not the same as) haiku. Heian era noble dudes were kind of all about the tanka, often composing them off the top of their head in greeting. The first bit, 5-7-5 is v. similar to the haiku; thematically you need season/weather words, etc. What sets it apart is the lower verse, 7-7, which relates to the human condition instead of nature. You’re kind of writing two poems at once, but you’re also not. I don’t usually write tanka like in this story, because English gives you a LOT more content w/ 31 syllables (I usually aim for 3-5-3-5-5, personally, if I’m doing English), but for the point of this story I kept the 31 syllable count. I also didn’t write it in Japanese first (shock!) and had Tendou take liberties with the “human condition” part, because the tanka for him are replacing the “grandmother said”s, and therefore need to be cryptic.
> 
> So, with all this in mind, please enjoy my sad, sad fanfic:

i.  
Kagami was tired, and to this end he planned to spend tonight deep in conference with his pillow. It was with a mixture of surprise and annoyance, then, that he noticed his _shoji_ sliding open. When he saw who it was, he was tempted just to close his eyes tightly and feign sleep, but some misguided sense of duty forced him to get up and greet Tendou. “How may I help you?” he managed to grind out with the bare minimum of courtesy.

Tendou scowled at him for his lack of manners, but entered the room and slid the door shut behind him anyway. “The proudest of vines weaves a twisted, winding path only it can walk; still, it would come to nothing without the firm trunk’s support.”

“ _What?_ Tendou, it is too late at night for this.”

“We need to make a plan to block Yaguruma’s attempt at swaying the Regent.”

Kagami stopped turning around with intent to sleep and looked back at Tendou, torn between being overjoyed at finally being trusted a little and having Tadokoro-san call the doctor. He finally settled on a skeptical, “’We’?”

“Yes. Come help.”

As far as Kagami was concerned, that was all that needed to be said, even if he was still really confused.

 

ii.  
Tendou returned, bringing with him plans and documents and not really telling Kagami anything, but not keeping him out of the loop either. They discussed ideas late into the night, until almost morning when Kagami was falling asleep on the table and Tendou yelled at him not to drool but smiled fondly while saying it. Since he couldn’t be of that much help, Kagami wondered exactly what kept Tendou coming back, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. Even if he wasn’t trusted with the whole truth, Kagami was just happy Tendou needed him.

 

iii.  
Staring, glaring, and pretending not to be paying attention while still sneaking glances had yielded no change in the state of his _shoji_. Tendou still hadn’t shown up, and by this point Kagami was starting to get angry. It wasn’t like Tendou had promised he’d come tonight, but he always came, and it wasn’t like him to be late. For a brief moment he considered Tendou might have been caught, or hurt himself, but he dismissed that since even if crossing the grounds had been perilous, he was _Tendou_.

When it became fairly apparent that Tendou wasn’t going to come at all, he kicked the table, resulting only in a sore foot. He was going to give Tendou a piece of his mind tomorrow. He was going to lecture him on the importance of keeping appointments and yell until he was hoarse. He was going to—

Kagami abruptly came to a halt, mentally and physically. He sounded like a slighted courtesan. Even angrier, he yelled at the still unmoved door “I’m not a _girl_!” before throwing himself onto his futon.

He wasn’t going to say anything to Tendou, because they were just having strategy meetings, not midnight liaisons (even if that was the rumor among the maid staff, because if Tendou was blowing him off for someone wearing the entire contents of a linen closet, dignity or no, he was going to get an earful about _responsibility_ ), and he was going to show Tendou he _didn’t care_.

 

iv.  
The combined effort of stopping himself from telling Tendou off for his sporadic attendance and enduring a mortifying lecture from Tadokoro-san about how all of Tendou’s night visits were adding up to a pretty serious relationship, so he had better persuade Tendou to make things official with whomever-it-was he was always meeting, had left Kagami so drained he drifted immediately off to sleep at dusk with time for only one venomous thought about how Tendou probably wasn’t even going to show up tonight.

He awoke to Tendou hunched over his table working by dim light; the back half of the lamp was covered so only Tendou’s papers were illuminated. “Tendou?” he asked, still dazed from sleep.

Tendou looked over, the light throwing deep shadows across his features. “Go back to sleep,” he said in the gentlest tone Kagami had ever heard from him.

“But, don’t you need help? Why didn’t you wake me up? I’ll—” He started to get up, but Tendou was already there, hand on his shoulder.

“It’s fine, go back to sleep.” He could read the confusion on Kagami’s face, so he added, “Though the sun shines bright, it holds no more answers than the blackness of night. Look not to them, the truest answers come from somewhere else.”

Kagami had _no idea_ what that meant, so he gave an exasperated sigh and let Tendou push him back down onto the futon. He was vaguely aware Tendou stayed where he was instead of immediately going back to work, but couldn’t figure out what to make of it before he was asleep again.

 

v.  
After very careful consideration of all the facts, Kagami concluded that perhaps something more was going on here than the stuff he knew Tendou wasn’t telling him. That’s why, a bit after they started work, he said with no preamble, “Tadokoro-san wants me to persuade you to make things clear with the person you’ve been seeing at night.”

Tendou stopped what he was doing and regarded Kagami very carefully.

“He says,” Kagami continued recklessly, “with how often you meet, your relationship must be very serious.”

“The firefly—”

“Tanka aren’t _clear_ , Tendou,” Kagami said with maybe a little more force than necessary as he leaned in over the table.

“You seem to have understood the last one.”

Kagami blinked and sat back, losing momentum, “What? That one about bears in far off deserts? Because I still don’t think bears can _live_ in deserts.”

“No,” Tendou said almost impatiently, “the one from the last night I was here.”

“Oh. Something about the sun at night? I don’t think that’s right either, Tendou, are you…?” Tendou’s expression made him trail off, caught by the intensity in his eyes. “What? If you’d just be straightforward—”

When Tendou stopped kissing him, Kagami wondered why this man didn’t have any setting between incredibly cryptic and wildly inappropriate.

“Just so we’re clear, I’m not a girl.”

“You just wait for me on the engawa every night, sighing into the garden.”

“I do not!” Kagami sputtered, and Tendou just laughed.


End file.
